


First Fantasy NaNoWriMo: 1: The Merchant's Tale: An Interesting Discussion Involving Teeth

by SkiesOverTokyo



Series: FirstFan NaNoWriMo Drabbles [1]
Category: First Fantasy (Webcomic)
Genre: Comedy, Drabble Collection, Dragons, Fantasy, Gen, NaNoWriMo, Set Before Series, Some Plot, gratuitous references to far too many things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 09:39:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16490183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkiesOverTokyo/pseuds/SkiesOverTokyo
Summary: In Which Syl Does Some Business





	First Fantasy NaNoWriMo: 1: The Merchant's Tale: An Interesting Discussion Involving Teeth

The bell rang as she entered the shop, waking me from my reverie. I had half nodded off, enraptured as I was with the battered old book in front of me-another relic from across the sea, from the once great, now fallen Iommic Empire. Utterly unreadable to most, but to me, albeit in strangely strangled turns of phrase, at least a little of its knowledge, a glimmer of that once great realm, revealed itself to me. Until, of course, the girl entered my shop.  
Perhaps a little detail is required at this point. My name is Illyas, a keeper, purveyor, buyer, seller and valuator of rare, unusual, and forgotten things, I own a little shop, _The Curio,_ not far from the sky-quay in Mooresville, a trading post of some renown on the Great Northern Road, perhaps two months hard ride south of the Edge.  I have plied my trade here, man and boy, for about ten winters, first assisting my father, then after he returned south, continued in his stead, as Father set up shop in the Imperial Capital, and continues to this day.  
Ahem.  
Where was I?  
The girl.  
  
The girl took a few steps into the shop, and, after a quick sweep of the objects around her, stepped around a battered suit of armour, a comparatively new artefact from the Second Imperial War, a mere century ago, that I acquired at the very start of my business, and stepped up to the counter, merrily dinging the bell, and giving me a grin that seemed to flash across her pale long face like lightning, from cheek to cheek.  
She had…a look about her.  A look I knew well, though rarely from one so young. A seasoned professional, and one looking to sell. How, may you ask, did I know such a thing? Years of experience, dear boy, meeting hundreds of customers every single one of them, from the opening of spring to the depths of winter.  
That, and the large bag that clicked and clinked as she let it drop by her side.  
  
I smiled back at her-it is always good to make a customer, buyer or seller comfortable, and in the light of the faerie crystals that hover around the counter (which are, by the way, **not** for sale), I took a good look at her. She was, for a start, taller, and even younger than I thought, dressed plainly but warmly for the encroaching winter, a heavy military-issue poncho draped over narrow, leanly muscled shoulders, hair as dark as ironwood falling across the light grey cloth, heavy walking boots, a heavy black dress darned in a few places with a lighter fabric and lighter thread. A set of mismatched necklaces, a hodgepodge of North, South, East and West, an entire world of travel summarised around her neck. From her appearance, and the wooden staff she rested one pale, long-fingered hand upon, I surmised three things in quick succession.  
  
Firstly, this young woman was almost certainly originally from beyond the Edge, from one of the Rüstungnomadenstadt, the moving, heavily armoured villages and towns that migrated, back and forth, across the Große Eisseen, vast frozen lakes that crisscrossed the lands beyond the Edge. No markings on her face or hands, so not one of the warrior-prone castes. The staff suggested a healer or…possibly a shaman, unusual as that was for Rüstungnomadenstadt tribes? It had been a long time since any texts or travellers had wended their way south from that unmapped abyss.

Secondly, she was no mere green traveller-everything about her, from her necklaces, containing coins from the Great Desert, complete with their odd triangular holes, a set of Imperial-made glass beads, from deep ochre to a startling green that caught the light however she turned, to a fearsome set of teeth that I could only assume were either from a vulf, or even an Eisdrache. In the centre of the middle row of three, however, was perhaps the most telling sign of how tough she was=mounted upon a shard of smoothed metal was, unmistakably, wyrdglass, and a larger, purer fragment than I have ever seen before. Just who was this girl? I’d only come across a few tales of dungeons having spoils this great a few times before, and never anything of this size or quality that didn’t find itself broken up or the cause of an entire guild’s implosion. The girl carried no guildemark, the clothing certainly fit no Fighter or Adventurer Guild inside the Empire, and none that I knew outside it.  
  
These two summaries led me quickly to a third.  
  
This young woman was bringing me items of a rare and unusual quality. This young woman, was, herself of a rare and unusual quality. I dared not suggest to myself that this strange woman from beyond the Edge, bedecked in trophies and keepsakes from the Empire’s furthest reaches and beyond, had soloed a dungeon that begat a piece of wyrdglass the size of a man’s thumb, pure as a mountain spring, but the idea of her keeping anything other than the company of heroes of legend seemed insane to me.  
  
I realised I’d been staring at her for a half minute, and sputtered an apology that she waved away with another of those lightning flash grins.  
“S’ok, s’ok. It’s early.”  
I nodded, even though the shop had been open a full hour and I’d downed a cup of dvarven coffee before I’d started, and a second sat, half full, on the counter.  
“W-what can I do for you, young lady”  
A pause,  
“I assume you have items to sell, given your bag? In that case, uh…let me see”  
I reached under the counter, and withdrew the bound leather ledger in which I kept all details of all my incoming items, in case of…well, various things but mostly fakes and frauds. Not that I expected any from this girl.  
“Would you prefer I value the most…valuable items first, or?”  
She shrugged, knelt down, untied the bag, and after a few seconds, withdrew an object wrapped in an oil cloth, unwrapped it and placed it before me.  
  
A dagger. Elvish, about the length of my forearm, and clearly scaled down to a child’s hand, with the grip clearly made of a good quality and remarkably soft leather. A richly decorated scabbard, a hunting scene from one of the Lays of Laird Drake wrapping around both sides, deer and stags before a hunt.  
“And So The Laird Dylan did hunt the White Stag thru fell and forest”, I find myself saying, and am surprised to hear the girl reply  
“Naught knowing it was his love transfigured”  
I looked up  
“You, young lady, are full of surprises. That’s an old poem.”  
A shrug, a grin.  
“For some. The blade is original, by the way”  
I took this as a hint, and eased the scabbard off, surprised how smoothly it moved.  
It was original, the care and quality of the smith clear. This was no mere toy, nor the mass produced utilitarian things, that the Elvish swordmaesters produced these days for rich nobles and stupid knights brought up on the indestrutablity of Elvish blades, and thus endlessly, and often fatally surprised to find a good quality broadsword could bend or shatter it with ease. This was, unmistakably, old, functional and produced for an Elvish princeling. Elvish blades are hard to date, due to the unchangablity of Elvish smithery, but this knife was at least a half dozen centuries old, yet bright and sharp as the day it was first gifted to its previous owner.  
  
I turned it over a few times, and something caught the light. I turned it towards the light, and gasped, despite myself. Engraved, with great care onto the blade, is a deer’s head, antlers stretching down the blade, head at the hilt, and intertwined with the antlers, a small inscription. I will admit a little fluency with most forms of Elvish, and the inscription was clear and concise.  
_May this Blade Aim True for You._  
 Elves are not the most sentimental of types, surrounded as they with the death of everything but themselves, and sentimentality for a weapon is even rarer. Yet, here it was, a child’s knife, with a carefully chosen inscription that truly made this knife more than a tool, but a treasured possession.  
  
I looked up at her, found the stammer returning  
“W-where did you find this?”  
“With the rest.”  
“The rest of-”  
I didn’t get to finish my sentence because, with both hands, the girl carefully reached into the bag, and withdrew, in great armfuls, about half of its contents. She leaned over, ignoring the skitter of coins from the clump, and dumped it down onto the counter, reaching down to pick up the few objects she’d dropped, placing them atop the pile.  
Coins, from what seems like everywhere, from square Yin from across the Dragon Sea, to the round, familiar Gal of the Empire. A few semi-precious stones. A good quality human-made sword, with no hilt, broken-no, _melted-_ at the halfway point. Half a dvarven shield. More gems. The front of a book with a richly embossed and engraved front plate, torn off at the spine. Another Elvish knife, without hilt, but engraved with a wolf down the blade. A dvarven axehead, without handle, a golden helmet-mask, a fearsome bared-mouth dragon that’s been buckled inward, almost inside out. A few coins spilled onto the floor, and I picked them up  
  
They were ancient, stamped with a Dvarven King whose name and appearance I didn’t even recognise, at least a score of centuries old. This was, of course, not impossible-dvarven coinage does not, unlike the kings of Men, get replaced every time an Emperor dies, but circulates till wear and tear makes it-but to see it in this quantity was unusual. Together, the collection was, if you will forgive the hyperbole, a treasure trove.  
“Well, I would have to check each piece in turn to check their age, authenticity, origi-”  
Again she crouched, and, in the slightly dimmed light of my shop, I see her hands briefly glow, her lips form a short spell.  
  
What she lifted into view put the rest of the objects to shame, and I quickly made space for it on a side table, picking a few Nor-Edge objects off a sturdy Elvish table. To describe it as a nugget of gold was, perhaps, unfair. It was closer to the size of one of the smaller sky-iron stars that the Dvarves occasionally drag north to hawk to the highest sellers, treasures full of flaw-gold and best-quality sword iron and occasionally precious gems, of which I stock a small number of, closer to starlets, little pebbles from the heavens, hard as steel.

Except these sky-iron stars are not made of Dvarve gold, and aren’t the size of my head, and aren’t solid. Because, I knew the moment I saw it it _had_ to be solid, a mass of melted and half melted and still recognisable coinage, bent and fused and lumped together. It entranced and frightened me. I knew no normal flame could melt these coins. Dvarves build these coins to last, to endure, long after their makers pass on, into the rock, and the idea of them _unmaking_ such a vast quantity is close to sacrilege. I turned it over, with some difficultly, and winced at what I find. A scorch mark, from front to back, marred the gold, turning it from a bright shine to a few shades lighter than carbon.  
  
_This is not the doing of any Dvarve-furnace fire_  I realised _. This cannot be any mortal flame to melt and discolour and ossify gold such. It is one thing, and one thing alone, and the fact **that** this girl is standing in front of me, presenting me with these objects becomes less a work of a good adventurer, and more the product of a **minor miracle**_. It took me a few seconds to realise she’s reached into a leather knapsack over one shoulder, and produced something, holding it out with surprising care and reverence. It caught the light, and _passed_ through it, a coloured light playing on the floor.  
  
Dragonscale.  
“Should proof be needed.” She said simply. I felt that my lips had suddenly gone dry, and finally managed to form a single word  
“How?”  
“Dragons are hot”  
“Not that, how did…how did you do it?!”  
I found incredulity rising, wanted to tell this girl off for making a mockery of the shop that she stood in, presenting this…this  _dragon’s hoard_ in, as though she’d simply strolled down to the local cave, lifted the creature off, shook it down for a bag load of coins and trinkets, took a scale, and walked back, unmarked and bruised.  
“You can’t have done it alone! Which guild do you work for? Who put you up to this?”  
  
Anger. I was surprised at it. I felt it rise within me. This girl was an idiot, didn’t she see?  
“You’re a fool. That dragon will hunt you down and take back what is it! You know they mark their treasure! They’ll burn this town to the ground to get a single coin back, let alone this!”  
I gestured at the mounds of coin  
“And I don’t have enough to cover this! You know I don’t! You’d struggle to sell all this outside the Capital! My father…”  
We could make a killing out of this, if what I felt was true _was_ true, if what she said next was what I thought it’d be.  
“My father’s shop in the Capital puts this to shame. He’d be better at assessing value of at least some of this than here.”  
  
“We can’t go to the Capital.”  
So she wasn’t alone. There were others.  
“Surely, you can give me at least something for the rest, then?”  
She picked up the nugget, her hands glowing and placed it back in the bag. I felt myself breathe a sigh of relief. Something…about the nugget wasn’t right, some dragonish pallor to it, the tinneas òirm, I think the dvarves call it. I cast an eye over the rest of the objects. Still too much. I cleared my throat.  
“Well, young lad-“  
“Syl. Call me Syl…?”  
“Illyas”  
“Pleased to meet you, Illyas.”  
She extended a hand, and I shook it. A nice, firm grip. A proper business handshake, my father would say of it. She wanted to get on with it, take her cash, and go. I picked my way through the hoard, numbers wheeling through my head, a decade of knowledge clicking into place, known valuations of items, styles of blade, metalwork, and countless other ephemera…  
“Well, Syl. I can give you…probably two hundred for the two daggers. Fifty for the axe head. Fifty for the sword, it’s a nice piece. Shield, book-front, the helm-mask…another two hundred…actually, make it two-fifty, I didn’t realise the work on the shield was this fine. The coins…I know a collector in Fayreport who’s an expert on coins from across the World, I can offer…shall we say one hundred per double-pound?”  
Syl nodded. I weighed the coins quickly, trying to stop the tremble of excitement in my hands, and came to a surprisingly high weight of ten double-pounds, and silently cursed my initial generosity, and short-sightedness. She’d cleared me out, and then some.   
 “So, in total, that comes to…”

  
“One thousand, five hundred, fifty. Quit stalling.”  
The voice made me jump, and I wheeled to find its owner. Leaning against one of the columns, inspecting a small, intricately carved figure of the diminutive Goddess of Luck, with her ceremonial Dice of Fates in one hand, and a long staff topped by an inverted empty triangle within a trio of triangles, was a boy. An extremely scruffy boy, in an overly large, illfitting coat, muddy boots, a faded red hooded tunic, and rough woollen leggings. His face was soft, surprisingly young, and utterly punchable, from the eyes that never stopped flicking around the shop, to the full lips that formed, as I finally noticed him, an irritating smile. I knew, without further rummaging in his background that this boy was a thief, from his silent appearance to the way he stepped towards us.  
  
To my deep annoyance, Syl greeted this boy with the warmth and familiarity that I would greet my own father, ruffling the untidy hair out of his flashing, greedy eyes.  
“Ah, I see you found us. And I see you’d found another figure of her.”  
“Hey, this one’s an antique, and a damn well carved one. And heck, after that escapade, I think we could do with a top-up in luck.”  
I coughed.  
“Syl, can we return to the matter in hand. Uh…”  
Closer to, it’s a little easier to gauge the age of the boy, somewhere in his early twenties, but there’s a certain nobility in his surprisingly youthful features, and his skinny stature. He may be a thief, but  he was a damn good one, his whole body language seemed to say.  
“And this is…one of your guild I assume?”  
  
The boy laughed, an annoying hacking noise that sounded like a dog trying to cough up an overly large bone.  
“Syl, have you been telling tales again?”  
“No. I think he assumed we didn’t do it, at least not without significant help. He’s been very meticulous, to his credit.”  
“Hmm, he needs proof, does ‘e?”  
A hand dug in a coat pocket, found what he was looking for, and withdrew it, extending to me. He dropped a tooth, fully the length of my palm, into my outstretched hand. It was, unmistakably, a dragon’s, and as the hand withdrew, I noticed the tell-tale marks of ointment’d and magick-healed burns. I turned it over, just to check, noting, with a shock that the tooth had roots, together with dried nerve-tissue and veins. My limited knowledge of dragon anatomy did, however, stretch to their teeth. It had been, not torn or broken out, but _cut_ out of its mouth, impossible on a live dragon, even under magickal or herbal sedation.  
  
“How…many did it take?”  I managed to say.  
“Two. Just us.”  
Impossible.  
“Impossible. That’s…that’s a feat from storybooks. The sort of things heroes-”  
“We’re not heroes” the boy muttered.  
“Just…large-scale pest control.” Syl continued “He was burning down homesteads, grain silos. He was making an entire dukedom starve.  Anyone would have done the same, I bet”  
“You’d need an army, Mages, crossbowmen…it would be like sieging a castle that can breathe fire!”  
This boy must be as good a tale spinner as Syl. They were both liars of a rare quality, as good a bard as any who sang. I was now convinced of it. They’d stumbled across a dragon’s hoard, the creature had died of old age or the duels these creatures occasionally fought for mating rights, and come up with this story to talk the price up.  
Except dragons don’t die of old age, and their toughness means that their mating contests are more bark than bite, a display of power rarely becoming physical combat. He was still talking.  
  
“Now, here’s the trick with dragons”.  
The boy leaned across the counter  
“They’re musket-proof, arrow-proof, sword-proof, anything less than a Grand Magus would require multiple mages, all of which are stationary targets to a dragon. But…”  
He grinned. I did not like that grin  
“Dragons are scaled everywhere but their biggest weak point. And, trust me…it’s a big weak spot. Have a guess.”  
I had no idea where he thought this imaginary weak spot to be  
“I...tell me.”  
“Their throat has to be. It’s how they breathe fire.”  
“But that would…you’d need to…”  
Oh gods. The burns on his hand. The tell-tale signs on the end of his fingers that softly re-messed hi hair, ignoring Syl’s attempts to tidy it.  
The boy was a magic user, a skilled one, from the scar-tissue that made his fingertips a crazed stop-start like summer-dried earth. It all made sense, and played in front of my eyes as though I myself had witnessed it.  
  
The dragon fang was about two thirds of the largest specimen I’d ever seen. Not fully grown, thus territorial, dangerous, staking his claim to the lands around him, oblivious to human habitation. It was a threat, and it burned, whether it was rival or homestead. They’d corned the creature, it had gone to breathe fire. Missed a few times. The boy had picked up, and aimed a sword at it, tried to catch it off guard, had the sword melted for his troubles, with the girl likely running decoy, or shielding him via her own magic, from the worst of the dragon’s wrath, and in the eye-blink between the dragon’s breath stopping, perhaps at the very end of the blast, he had fired back, burned or froze or tore or whatever spell had torn the dragon open from the inside, blown or cut, or torn open its throat, and killed it.  
  
I realised my hands had been shaking.  
“Alright, I believe you. So…I assume you want paying. I’m…afraid, unless you want to only sell me part of the coins, or one of the daggers…I simply don’t have enough.”  
They exchange looks.  
“I…suppose  I could sell you something back in return, though I fear that there’s not much for adventurers on the move; my clients tend to be more collectors with big, roomy houses…”  
The boy reached across the counter, picked up the sheathed dagger, unsheathed it, and spun it a few times, testing the weight. This boy knew, almost instinctively, the perfect middle point where the knife balanced, tested it a few times, swiping and stabbing through the air. I knew, deep in my gut, that this boy not only knew how to kill, but _had_ killed.  
“Syl?”  
Syl turned to me, shrugging. She was used to this, it was clear. I hastily tried to come up with a price that brought me below the Gal I had on the premises, but the boy was quicker.  
“The tooth alone, with the structure intact is at least one hundred. The other dagger is too good to have the price dropped on it, so….one thousand, five hundred, fifty, I think you said?”  
“Tam…”  
It’s more the admiration of a relative than a chiding tone. I cursed her under my breath.  
“Statuette of the Little Lady drops us to…?”  
  
The little bastard was giving me a lifeline. He knew I didn’t have enough, knew I couldn’t pay them in full, so he was going to haggle for the statue.  
“Well…it’s a century old, the carving technique, of course, is of the highest quality, the statue is, of course, banned under the Imperial edict around organised gambling, and, of course, it’s a rarity as it is…one hundred.”  
I expected him to shout me down, to call me ridiculous. Instead he reached out a hand.  
“Done.  Syl, you want anything? I’d rather not put our friend out of pocket”  
Syl had stepped away to where I keep the antiquarian books, and was gently flicking through each in turn. Searching for something. I wanted to tell this boy exactly where to stick his opinion, but the smile he gave me was too benign, too _bloody_ nice, to argue. Syl turned  
“Do you have…uh, a good map of the Empire? We lost ours against the dragon. And a good cookbook, with local recipes if you have them?”  
I picked both _Uematu’s Compleat and Unabridged Guide to the Empire_ , and _Two Hundred and Fifty Dishes for Field and Fief_ off the shelf, and handed them to her. She grinned, properly this time.  
“For those two, fifty?”  
Tam, if that was the boy’s name, nodded.  
“So a total of one thousand, four hundred.”  
Another nod. I counted the money, with some reluctance, into a leather bag, and handed it to Syl, Tam keeping count, to my irritation. He grinned again once Syl had the money stowed away in her now visibly sagging knapsack. Clearly, this girl could have done with a top of the range bottomless bag, but the Mages in the Capital were keen for those not to be sold after a dimensional rift opened over a small village by the Dragon Sea and a rain of weapons, coins, and personal sundries had crushed the Duke Drenzor’s summer villa. And, unfortunately, as he was a great collector of pre-Imperial armour, the Duke Drenzor and his family.  
  
He held his hand out, and I took it. Another strong grip, though the scar tissue felt cold against my hand  
“Pleased to do business with you. Name’s Tam Bargeld. We’re…in the sword-for-hire business, so if you ever need…any unusual items found, moved or delivered, we’ll be…around. Eventually”  
The boy stowed the statuette of the Little Lady carefully in his coat, whilst Syl stowed her books under an arm.  
“Anyway, thanks…Hope the rest of your day goes well.”  
I nodded. Tam nodded, turned and the strange, mismatched duo wander to the door, stepped out into the midday, and, with a jingle of the bell, they were gone.  
  
I let myself slump into the armchair behind the counter, and turned the tooth over in my hand. My hands shook so badly, the adrenaline of this strangest of meetings, that I eventually carefully placed it down atop the small mountain of objects. In the parting, the boy, Tam, had left a, surprisingly for him, refined little object, a small piece of wood, a _business card_ , I eventually realised¸on which was written, in Common, Elvish and the most widely spoken form of Dvarven, in neat little letters, the following:

 _Tam & Syl_  
Swords for Hire  
No Job Too Big, No Task Too Small  
(NO QUESTS!)

I turned it over, on the reverse, a simple rune, _Talk_ , that used by Elves to communicate, and a smaller rune meaning _ignite_. Simple, but effective. Maybe another day. I wandered to the front of the shop, locked the door, pulled the shutters down, and flicked the sign to _closed,_ then walked back to the counter, pulled the leather _Purchases_ book from within the mound of the hoard, found my best pen, and, reaching into the bottom drawer, withdrew a dvarven metal thermos, and a small, elegant china cup, pouring myself a cup of strong black tea. I reflected, as I began to catalogue todays purchases, that today had been a very good day.

 -

The corpse of the dragon lies, sprawled across the cavern floor, and even for the woman sometimes called “Steelheart”, the carnage takes the Duke of Ormen a little by surprise. She has no fondness for dragons, but this is overkill. For a moment, she wonders, aloud, whether this is the work of the Butcher of Hnifur, and the gunners he keeps talking about, but the creature’s neck is blown open below the jaw, a gaping, disgusting raw hole, a maw, a second, fatal mouth. Her hand tightens on the handle of her rapier, hand running through the ice blonde of her hair.  
  
One of her advisors steps over to her, the black-haired girl aghast at the carnage around her. Sophia has always been a sensitive girl, if the collection of foundling animals around the Villa of Ormen is anything to go by, though that sensitivity seems to stop short of humans. She holds out something with one hand.  
“The villagers can’t understand where the gold went-it was only a younger dragon, so the hoard won’t be colossal, but-” __  
“Let them have it. They’ve suffered enough.”  
“Your Excellency-“  
“Come the winter, I want these people fed, and those without homes housed in the nearest barracks.”  
“But Your Excellency, how do we know-“  
  
The Duke of Ormen adjusts her epaulets,  relaxes, noting to herself that this whole uniform will likely need _extensive_ cleaning. Still, she likes the way that blood looks on the white so…  
“People are greedy. We will let them enjoy their spoils for the moment. I want the tithe doubled next Spring, however. To punish them for that greed. After all, I am their Duke. It _is_ my treasure by right, isn’t it, Sophia?”  
The girl nods, and holds out the card again. The Duke of Ormen takes it, turns it over. A flash of fury behind her eyes, and the next few words are like icicles stabbed into the back.  
“Where did you find this?”  
“I-In its jaws. Well. In the gap where…a tooth seems to have been removed. Well, several teeth. Removed with some precision. My Lord, who could-”  
“Who, my dear Sophia? Well, they seem to have introduced themselves so well. Tam and Syl, that’s who. I want you and Martha to return to the Villa, and find out everything you can about these two. Now.”  
Sophia nods, bows, and retreats, leaving the Duke to her musings  
_A new prey presents itself. An interesting two, to kill a dragon, and a foolish two to introduce themselves so **brazenly**_  
And for the first time that day, the young woman who some call The Thin White Duke, smiles.  
_Let the hunt begin_


End file.
